1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony, including data network telephony (DNT) Internet protocol network telephony (IPNT), and connection-oriented, switched telephony (COST), and pertains particularly to a system for optimizing scheduling of contact center resources including scheduled modification of routing strategies.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
The field of telephony has undergone many improvements over the years relative to costs of services, quality of services, and efficiency. State-of-art contact centers now handle a myriad of interaction types and subtypes using state-of-art computer telephony integrated (CTI) equipment and facilities.
In current art, scheduling of resources is often performed by an automated system that is integrated with workflow management and agent statistics. The system forecasts arrivals (interaction load) and schedules the level of available staff (agents, knowledge workers, etc.) required to handle the load at the rate of arrivals as predicted. Each agent or auto-component utilized is defined as a schedulable contact center resource. The actual process of forecasting in a contact center environment involves predicting interaction load (calls, emails, and other communication types) for certain time periods and attempting to meet the expected demand by scheduling staff and systems during those periods. Scheduling is typically a mathematical problem of finding available resources for specific time periods wherein arrivals are expected to occur. Further, each agent in the contact center is considered a schedulable resource.
A problem with current state-of-art systems known to the inventors is that the routing logic in a contact center is assumed fixed and centralized within the center. Routing strategies are designed to optimize workflow and efficiency by making routing decisions based on real-time metrics in the contact center at the time of a pending interaction. Many strategies are monolithic, containing a single processing thread. Sometimes several routing strategies are associated or grouped into a collection of single-threaded processes that may or may not link to one another.
A contact center forecasting system makes predictive assessments of what real workload requirements will look like throughout a given work period. Those assessments drive scheduling and commitment of resources. If predictions are off significantly then additional costs may be incurred because of scheduling changes and re-quantified commitment levels of resources. Although initial forecasts may be fine tuned by periodic consultation with available statistics, interaction loads and available staffing levels for different interaction types may not be orchestrated to achieve the most efficient and cost effective workflow at certain times or throughout the work period.
What is needed in the art is a system that can schedule or directly order dynamic abstract routing strategy changes based on perceived and real interaction load verses available or scheduled contact center resources including live agents. That is, an additional variable should be introduced, which variable is amendment of routing strategy.